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Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Narrative - Meet the Robinsons Character Film Review

Fig. 1. Meet the Robinsons poster.

Meet
the Robinsons (2007) created by Walt Disney Animation
Studios and directed by Stephen J. Anderson, who has also worked on other
animations such as Tarzan (as a writer) and Tangled (as a story artist) tells
the story of Lewis, a young intelligent inventor orphan who is yearning for a
family. Lewis is being tracked by a mysterious man from the future who wears a
bowler hat, he intends to ruin Lewis’s life and claim Lewis’s invention as his
own. Another stranger from the future intervenes and takes Lewis to the future,
they then team up to fix the situation they are in.

The purpose of this review is to examine the breakdown of
the two opposing characters in the story. The characters this review is going
to focus on are Lewis, the main character and Bowler Hat Guy, who we later
discover to be Michael ‘Goob’ Yagoobian who was Lewis’s orphanage roommate. These
characters are very much opposites and have very different views on the world
that they inhabit.

Fig. 2. Lewis still.

To start with we will analyse Lewis, the movie gives us a
little bit of backstory about him in the first few minutes. We find out that
his mother leaves him at the doors of an orphanage, so he is alone from the
very beginning. We are then shown that he is a bright minded individual that
attempts to create some interesting inventions, such as a peanut butter and
jelly gun, to serve the perfect breakfast. His view of the world is that if he
is intelligent and invents something impressive, he will get adopted and find a
family that will love him. Lewis wants to be adopted at the beginning of the
film, and then he wants to find his mother so she can take him back. His goal
is to find a family and he believes that inventing will help him achieve that,
another goal is that he wants to make the world a better place through his
inventions. He ultimately needs to be loved and part of a family, being an
orphan this comes as no surprise. Internally our character is intelligent and
starts off determined; however after a few failures he starts to become nervous
and doesn’t believe in himself anymore, he also is quite lonely due to being an
orphan and the failure amplifies this as he worries he will never have a
family. Externally he is mostly calm and smiling; he tries to look positive
even though inside he is worried about failing. Lastly we will look at his flaws,
Lewis’s main flaw is that after he fails he gets depressed and starts to
believe that he will never succeed in life, this flaw is something that takes
him awhile, but he eventually overcomes it.

Fig. 3. Michael still.

Next we will look at Michael’s character, his backstory
is shown at the beginning of the movie as well, he is Lewis’s roommate and he
is a baseball player. He is constantly kept awake at night by Lewis creating
things and it slowly begins to affect how his life unfolds. He unfortunately
misses the winning catch in a baseball game because he falls asleep on the
field due to Lewis keeping him awake all night, he ultimately blames Lewis for
ruining his life and begins to develop hatred. Michael’s view of the world is
that Lewis ruined his chance to be adopted and have a happy life; he blames him
for him becoming a failure and becomes bitter and twisted because of it.
Michael wants to get revenge on Lewis, his goal is to sabotage Lewis’s life by
stealing his first real invention and claiming it as his own, this will then destroy
the life Lewis will have. Michael needs revenge and teams up with a bowler hat
robot to achieve this, however we later discover that Michael is not really the
villain in the story, he has a grudge but overall he is pretty harmless, the
hat however is a different story. Internally Michael is a bit dim, he isn’t the
most intellectual character and the movie makes jokes about this a few times by
having minions that he controls say “I'm just not so sure how well this plan
was thought through”. He is also full of hatred and despair due to a horrible
life of failing. Externally he completely demonstrates that he isn’t very
smart, how he moves, acts and talks are a complete reflection of his stupidity.
A lot of the time he also looks quite nervous and overall quite sad, he is a
character that you end up feeling sympathy for more than anything. To finish up
we will look at his flaws, Michael’s main flaw is that he is pessimistic and
blames all of his failures on one incident instead of moving forward, his
stupidity also is a big flaw as he is used by the bowler hat and doesn’t
realise it.

Over the course of the story both characters change,
Lewis starts off being optimistic about being adopted and invents stuff in the
hope that he will find a family, he then becomes less and less optimistic as he
fails and he begins to gradually get less confident about his abilities. He
over comes this by the end and becomes and happy and confident character that
achieves everything he wants to. Michael however starts off being a happy
baseball player, this changes when he misses the winning catch and he then
develops hatred from Lewis, his hatred evolves but by the end of the story he
lets go of his hate and leaves even though Lewis tries to welcome him in to his
future family.

Lastly we will look at the scene in which Lewis gets the
time machine working and how the characters change during this scene. Lewis
starts this scene feeling unconfident and quite scared of the situation; he is
then attacked by bowler hate minions and is forced to fix the time machine. He
manages to stop Michael from claiming his invention and stops the evil bowler
hat, Lewis leaves this scene feeling confident, fulfilled and he now knows he
can achieve what he wants if he “Keeps moving forward”. Michael enters this
scene feeling confident, he has successfully ruined Lewis’s life; however after
all of the events he realises that he was wrong and he feels sorry for
attempting to destroy his old roommate’s success.

To conclude, Meet the Robinsons is a fun movie with some
unexpected plot twists and interesting characters. It had a nice overall
message about the importance of moving forward and not dwelling on mistakes. Both
characters contribute to the story in interesting ways and they change each
other drastically by the end and they are very clear opposites.